Over the past several years, it has become apparent that the computing architectures upon which a business is based cannot be closed or proprietary if the business is going to have a chance of surviving. Since no dominant software vendor has emerged within the energy industry, the typical energy company has adopted a “best of breed” approach to fulfilling its technology needs. While this approach sounds good in theory, the end result has been a jumble of systems that do not communicate and which force users to enter duplicate data in multiple databases in multiple formats.
In the energy trading software market, existing products suffer from a number of limitations. The limitations include an inability to readily adapt to a changing business environment, for example, with respect to hourly, regulatory compliance. In addition, existing products suffer from limited extensibility. For example, the traditional gas marketing software model couples contracts and deals with accounting via multiple separate operations for purchase, pooling, transportation, imbalance, sale, storage, and inventory.
The markets for pipeline and gas marketing systems are rapidly changing. Present products are unable to satisfy the needs of the new markets. Demands for new functionality from customers representing international markets (primarily European) are continuously placing more pressure on present systems.
Accordingly, it would be desirable to provide a method and system architecture to overcome the problems in the art.
It would also be desirable to provide an energy trading transaction management system and software having major functional additions in the areas of contracts, deals and pricing, operations, and accounting.
In addition, it would be desirable to provide an energy trading transaction management system and software that includes technical/architectural opportunities with respect to scalability, being web based, and providing integration.